Like Magic, Witchcraft Charms Teenagers

New York Times, February 13, 2000 | By Ruth La Ferla

NEW YORK -- Occupying a place of honor in Emn Haddad-Friedman's bedroom in
Brooklyn is a trunk. "Just a box really," Haddad-Friedman said, one that doubles
as an altar, providing a perch for such items as a pair of candlesticks, an
incense burner, a cast-iron cauldron and, she said wryly, sometimes her cats.

A solitary practitioner of Wicca -- a name for modern witchcraft --
Haddad-Friedman has, in the parlance of the craft, lately "come out of the broom
closet." She displays the symbols of her beliefs in full view of friends and
family members, who have come to regard them, she said, with mild bemusement.

Haddad-Friedman, a senior honor student at an alternative high school in
Manhattan, practices witchcraft as time permits. "My best rituals are
spontaneous," she said. "I'm 17, I'll be going to college; I've got a life to
live." She never fails, however, to acknowledge a full moon with a skyward
glance and a wave.

Falynn Trayer, also 17, is similarly breezy about her witchcraft. "I have no
set rituals," she said. Trayer is the daughter of a Wiccan author, who uses the
pen name Silver RavenWolf. "If I want a better grade at school, I may ask the
god and goddess for their help, burn a candle -- something like that," she said.

She is utterly diligent, however, about wearing her pentacle, the
five-pointed star enclosed within a circle that is the symbol of Wicca,
displaying it outside her clothes. There was a time, she said, when her icon
alarmed classmates and teachers at her high school in south-central
Pennsylvania, who thought that they detected about it a faint whiff of sulfur.
"They used to look at my pentacle and call me names," Trayer said. "Now, they
see it and want to know more." She usually obliges with a brief explanation, but
stops short of describing the subtler mysteries of her faith. "Every religion
has its secrets," she said.

Trayer and Haddad-Friedman are members of a movement gaining an ardent
following among teen-agers, mostly girls, who are in part captivated by the
glossy new image of witches portrayed on television shows and in the movies. No
longer the hideous, wart-covered crone of folklore and fairy tale, witches in
hit television shows like "Charmed," starring Shannen Doherty, and the 1996
movie "The Craft," a favorite with teen-agers at video stores, are avatars of
glamour, power and style.

Other youthful adherents of Wicca, seeking an alternative path to
spirituality, are attracted by the craft's lack of structure and dogma. Wiccans,
as they have been known since Gerald Gardner, an English high Wiccan priest,
popularized the faith in the 1950s and '60s, have no codified beliefs or
essential texts. Practitioners are unified primarily by their belief in a dual
divinity: a god and goddess. They also share a reverence for the natural world,
which they see as permeated with powerful energy that may be tapped through
rituals or magic for healing or success in work or love.

Generally meeting in covens, which anoint their own priests and priestesses,
Wiccans chant and cast or draw circles to invoke their deities, mainly during
festivals like Samhain and Yule, which coincide with Halloween and Christmas,
and when the moon is full. Few are willing to discuss what they call their faith
openly with strangers, for fear of being stigmatized. Fewer still seek converts,
perhaps because there is no need. In recent years, this once largely underground
practice has come out in the open, its numbers climbing strongly since 1986,
when a federal appeals court ruled that Wicca was a legal religion protected by
the Constitution.

Estimates of the movement's size in the United States vary from 100,000 to
about 1 million, the latter figure cited by Fritz Jung, who with his wife, Wren
Walker, created the Witches' Voice, a Web site at www.witchvox.com. Teen-age
Wiccans, who tend to worship alone or to meet in small, informal groups, are the
hardest to track. While there is no definitive count, 35 percent of the total
visitors to the Witches' Voice -- or close to 5,000 of them -- are under 18,
said Jung, who tracks their ages. "So Ya Wanna Be a Witch?" the company's Web
page for teen-agers, has drawn 175,000 visitors in the last two years, he said.

Judging by the popularity of Web sites aimed at teen-agers (some 320 are
listed on Witchvox alone), and by the small army of television producers, movie
makers, magazine editors and booksellers now promoting the Wiccan lifestyle, the
craft has cast a powerful enchantment on the high-school and college-age
population.

"The contemporary witch is the beautiful 25 year old that you see on TV,"
said Jami Shoemaker, the publicist for Lllewellyn Worldwide, the St. Paul-based
publisher of RavenWolf's books "Teen Witch" and "To Ride a Silver Broomstick."

The pert, comely and often sultry Wiccans of recent movies, including
"Practical Magic," and of television hits like "Sabrina, the Teen-age Witch,"
"Buffy, the Vampire Slayer" and "Charmed," are cast as slender Circes.

The three fetching Wiccan siblings of "Charmed," broadcast Thursday nights on
the WB network, wear skin-baring sweaters and coral-slicked lips as they
dispatch demons, exuding a wholesome randiness all the while. Their candid
sexuality, played against their otherwise genteel demeanors, has made "Charmed"
the No. 2 rated show on the network among viewers 18 to 34. Magazines, too, have
heeded the pagan's siren call. A recent issue of Jump, a monthly for teen-age
girls, featured a fashion layout on "goddess style" -- an update on hippie
exoticism. The magazine refrains from discussing witchcraft directly lest it
alienate some readers, said its editor, Lori Berger, but it peppers its pages
with features on astrology, herbal cures and color therapy -- witches' stock in
trade. "In our reader surveys, those stories just score though the roof," Berger
said. "There's a sense of magic that girls get from this that is very
empowering."

Booksellers have been particularly enterprising in trading on witchcraft's
appeal to the lovelorn: the Borders bookstore on 57th Street and Park Avenue in
Manhattan has dedicated no less than 21 feet of shelf space to Magical Studies,
including titles like "The Little Book of Love Spells" (Andrews McNeel, 1997)
and "Titania's Wishing Spells: Love" (William Morrow, 2000). In the last year,
even cosmetics makers have capitalized on Wicca. MAC, a hip small brand,
introduced a collection called Earth Goddess, and recently expanded it to
include fragrances it calls "potions."

"These products are not about sorcery," maintained Michelle Feeney, MAC's
vice president for global communication. But it is hard to miss the witchy
message in the advertisements. Asphalt Flower, a pungent oil, is described as "a
harmony of dark blossoms, perversely empowered by dense woody notes." More than
a cosmetic for the soul, witchcraft is a lodestone for the defiantly
unconventional and the would-be hip, who stream into Manhattan shops like
Morgana's Closet on West 10th Street, which sells pendulums for divining, tarot
cards and moonstone rings; and into Enchanted Childe on Orchard Street, where
tightly laced frocks with bell-shaped sleeves recall the singer Stevie Nicks, a
favorite of Wiccans, who took to the stage in the 1970s trailing wispy scarves,
her face illuminated by a hundred candles. But to focus on Wicca's trappings is
perhaps to miss its impact as a faith on sincere seekers. They burn incense,
consecrate candles, chant and draw "magick" circles in the air. Simone Magaletta,
21, a junior at New York University and a self-taught aspiring Wiccan, maintains
that learning the craft has influenced her profoundly. "It has made me more
determined to make something of myself," she said. "And taught me to live in a
more positive way."

The craft is "especially appealing to the young people who want to be active
participants in their own spiritual lives," said Wren Walker of the Witches'
Voice.

Witchcraft is also a magnet for feminists, who identify with its female
deity, and for environmentalists drawn by the reverence for nature. It also
exerts a pull on the eccentric, the sensitive and the socially disconnected.
Wicca "empowers the marginalized," said John K. Simmons, a professor of
religious studies at Western Illinois University, who has studied contemporary
witchcraft. "It appeals most of all to the intelligent, poetic young woman who
is not necessarily going to go out for cheerleader or date the captain of the
football team."

Such pursuits hold little charm for a 15-year-old Wiccan in from Roseville,
Calif., a town near Sacramento, who is one of many teen-age witches who list
their e-mail addresses on the Witches' Voice. Asking to be identified only as
Tuesday, her on-line name, she said in an e-mail message: "I still read these
childhood favorites, 'The Young Wizard' series by Diane Duane and so many others
I can't begin to list them." Her rituals are mostly spontaneous, she added.
"I'll draw the blinds up and sleep in the light of the full moon if I can. I
also try to pray daily at my altar. I light the big red candle and kneel before
I do math and English homework."

Friends sometimes tease her, she went on, humming snatches of "Black Magic
Woman" in her presence and asking her to turn their teachers into frogs. She
tries to take their taunts in stride and to cope with her mother's disapproval
as well. "My mother thinks that this is weird," Tuesday wrote. "Wiccans to her
are not to be trusted. She tells me that this is a temporary thing that she and
my father must discuss. They're considering not allowing me to practice in our
house."

Wicca appeals most to middle-class kids, mostly girls, who live in rural
areas and suburbs, said Andres I. Perez y Mena, an assistant professor of
anthropology at Long Island University in Brooklyn. "They have few distractions
and even less control over their lives, and they practice sorcery to exert power
over their existence." But, he added, "Rituals and cauldrons aren't a substitute
for social action."

They are, however, potent symbols of rebellion. "The witch stands outside the
notion of acceptable behavior; she challenges the power structure, she's
dangerous, she's angry," said Phyllis Curott, a lawyer, Wiccan priestess and the
author of "The Book of Shadows" (Broadway Books, 1999), in which she describes
her discovery of the craft.

Although Wicca portrays itself as a positive creed, it remains the bane of
some parents, educators and clergymen, who are concerned or even alarmed by its
associations with black magic and demons. Wiccans are not to be confused with
the black-cloaked, hardware-festooned Goths and Satanists, other subcultures
popular with teen-agers that are obsessed with death and invoke the devil in
their rites. Wiccans reject Satan as a fiction devised by man. "There is no
black magic or white magic, there is only magic," maintained Lady Armida, a
Wiccan priestess, who is the owner of Enchanted Childe.

Ignoring such disclaimers, some school officials have sought to root out the
Wiccans in their midst. At Lincoln Park High School in Lincoln Park, Mich., a
Detroit suburb, Crystal Seifferly, a 17-year-old honor student, was told not to
wear a pentacle. But in a court case decided just over a year ago, the American
Civil Liberties Union successfully argued that the school's prohibition violated
her First Amendment rights.

When they emerge from the "broom closet," young Wiccans like Haddad-Friedman
of Brooklyn, who dresses primarily in black and paints streaks of color in her
long, tar-black hair, still draw comments and quizzical looks from teachers and
strangers. Recently, a teacher stopped her in the school hallway,
Haddad-Friedman recalled, and asked with concern, "Are you all right?" "Some
people -- strangers in the street -- even tried to get me to go to counseling,"
she added.

To some degree, such anxieties are understandable. There is no overlooking
witchcraft's charisma for self-styled rebels.

"I was a big metal head, with the chains, the leather jacket, the whole nine
yards, and I wanted to become a Satanist," said Chris, 24, who prefers to be
identified by his first name only. Leaning on a counter stocked with
rainbow-colored incense powders at Enchanted Childe, where he works, he recalled
discovering witchcraft instead, while a teen-ager. He calls it an uplifting path
to inward transformation, but he frequently hears from people "who are getting
into the craft because they want to be feared," he said. "You know -- they
imagine people will take one look at their pentacle and rush to get out of the
way."